Category: Євросоюз

The Trump administration is energizing its campaign to counter China’s growing global influence as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo heads to Europe this week on a four-nation trip that will also highlight disputes with Russia over Venezuela and elsewhere as well as deep U.S. isolation on the cause and impact of climate change.   With China seeking a greater presence throughout the continent, U.S. officials said Pompeo will renew warnings over the use of advanced Chinese telecommunications technology as well as blunt Beijing’s aspirations to play a significant role in the Arctic, a region that is rapidly opening up to …

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Stevo Pendarovski, the presidential candidate backed by North Macedonia’s center-left government, won the presidency Sunday in a runoff election with a conservative rival.   State election commission chief Oliver Derkorski announced late Sunday that with nearly 99 percent of the votes counted, Pendarovski, the candidate of the ruling Social Democratic Union, had won with 51.8% of the votes. Gordana Siljanovska Davkova, the candidate favored by the conservative opposition VMRO-DPMNE party, got 44.5%.   The two politicians had each received about 42% in the first round of voting April 21, which had three candidates.   Even before the official announcement, Social …

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The party of far-right leader Marine Le Pen will top the upcoming European Parliament elections with 22 percent of the vote, just ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s REM party, an Ipsos poll released on Sunday. It was the first time Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) – formerly the National Front – overtook Macron’s REM in an Ipsos survey ahead of the EU election this year, although other, daily polls have shown the RN in pole position before. EU elections will be held on May 26 in France. The poll of 1,500 people was conducted on May 2-3, after Macron announced …

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Italy’s anti-establishment 5-Star Movement piled pressure on its government partner the League on Sunday to dump a junior minister under investigation for corruption, in a case that could pull the coalition apart. Relations between 5-Star and the far-right League have grown increasingly fraught in the run-up to European Union parliamentary elections on May 26, with the two parties acting more like bitter political enemies than cabinet allies. Their growing rivalry triggered an unprecedented spat between the interior and defense ministries at the weekend as tensions grew over the fate of junior transport minister Armando Siri, who is very close to …

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British Prime Minister Theresa May says her Conservative government and the opposition Labour Party have a duty to strike a compromise Brexit agreement to end months of political deadlock over Britain’s exit from the European Union. Writing in the Mail on Sunday, May told Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn: “Let’s do a deal.” She said a cross-party compromise was not her first choice, but “we have to find a way to break the deadlock.” The Conservatives are desperate to move forward after losing hundreds of positions in last week’s local elections. Labour also suffered losses as voters punished both main parties …

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Pope Francis has arrived in Sofia at the start of three days in the former communist states of Bulgaria and North Macedonia, his fourth trip abroad this year. Both countries have tiny Catholic minorities and most of the population considers themselves Orthodox. The pope is likely to use this opportunity to help cement the Vatican’s relations with the Orthodox community in Eastern Europe. In a message to the Bulgarian people ahead of his Sunday arrival, the pope said his trip to Bulgaria would be a pilgrimage focused on faith, unity and peace. Bulgaria, he added, is home to witnesses of …

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He is wheelchair-bound and has limited use of his hands, but Alexander Gorbunov, the author of hugely popular social media accounts in Russia, has emerged as one of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics. Diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy and using his right index finger to type, the 27-year-old author of StalinGulag skewers the “hypocrisy” of Putin’s system and the everyday injustices ordinary Russians face. Known for his dry wit and generous use of profanities, StalinGulag has built a near 1.5 million strong army of followers on Twitter and Telegram, with a total media outreach believed to include several million …

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Polls have opened in North Macedonia, where voters will elect a new president Sunday in a runoff election dominated by deep divisions over a change in the country’s name agreed to with Greece that has opened the path to NATO and European Union membership.  Greece had for decades demanded that the tiny ex-Yugoslav republic change its name from Macedonia, arguing that it implied a territorial claim on a northern Greek province also called Macedonia. The new name was formally ratified earlier this year.  But the accord continues to divide Macedonians and has eclipsed all other issues during campaigning for the presidential election, when about 1.8 million voters will choose between two …

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Anti-government protesters marched in France for a 25th straight week Saturday but in significantly smaller numbers than during the yellow vest movement’s first months or for a May Day rally that attracted tens of thousands of participants. Several dozen people demonstrated at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport to denounce privatization plans. Protests were also held in Paris and other cities around France, including Nice, Marseille and Lyon, where environmentalists and yellow vest protesters joined forces.    The Interior Ministry counted a total of 2,600 participants at three events in Paris and 18,900 in all of France, a low for Saturday …

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VOA’s Russian Service contributed to this report. WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump applauded Slovak Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini’s announcement that his country plans to increase its military spending to 2% of its GDP in the next three years, as well as purchase U.S.-made F-16 war planes. A joint statement issued by the two leaders after their White House meeting Friday said the U.S. and Slovakia “seek to build on this and deepen our defense cooperation by concluding a mutually beneficial Defense Cooperation Agreement.” Earlier, speculation about terms of a bilateral Defense Cooperation Agreement, or DCA, had stirred controversy in …

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Britain’s governing Conservative Party said Saturday that it is ready to compromise to secure a Brexit deal after suffering its worst result in local elections for more than 20 years. In contests for local authorities across England, the party lost about 1,300 seats, a quarter of its total, as voters punished the government for the U.K’s Brexit impasse. The opposition Labour Party also suffered losses as voters switched to smaller parties and independent candidates. Almost three years after Britain voted to leave the European Union, the date and terms of Brexit remain uncertain following months of gridlock in Parliament. Many …

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Russia appears to be shifting its stance on China’s Belt and Road development initiative in Eurasia, envisioning a bigger role for itself in the process, in what could be a sign that Moscow is worried about waning influence among its neighbors. When Vladimir Putin traveled to Beijing last month for China’s Belt and Road Forum, he described Russia-China relations now as “the best they have been in their entire history.” He also said the Belt and Road initiative is “intended to strengthen the creative cooperation of the states of Eurasia.” But Putin’s enthusiasm for participating came with a polite demand, …

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Scientists are conducting a large-scale, underwater experiment in the North Sea, testing for carbon dioxide leaks in what they say is world first. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports the researchers are testing a plan to pump some of the world’s excess carbon into depleted underwater wells. …

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European and American investigators have broken up one of the world’s largest online criminal marketplaces for drugs, hacking tools and financial-theft wares in raids in the United States, Germany and Brazil. Three German men, ages 31, 22 and 29, were arrested after the raids in three southern states on allegations they operated the so-called “Wall Street Market” darknet platform, which hosted about 5,400 sellers and more than 1 million customer accounts, Frankfurt prosecutor Georg Ungefuk told reporters in Wiesbaden on Friday. A Brazilian man, the site’s alleged moderator, was also charged. The three Germans, identified in U.S. court documents as …

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Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, returns to politics on Saturday with a vow to resist any new referendum on independence from the United Kingdom. The Conservatives in pro-EU Scotland have seen their poll support slip over their handling of Brexit, coinciding with Davidson’s six-month maternity leave, while support for the pro-independence Scottish National Party has risen. On Friday the results of elections for seats on local councils in England, the biggest of the UK’s four nations, provided stark evidence of how the fallout from Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union has undermined the two biggest parties, …

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Turkish prosecutors are carrying out 32 investigations into the narrow opposition victory last month in Istanbul’s mayoral election. The investigations come as the ruling AKP intensifies calls for another vote, amid fears of political and economic chaos. Prosecutors are looking into 100 voting stations in three Istanbul districts, which the opposition CHP won. CHP candidate Ekrem Imamoglu narrowly won the Istanbul vote, ending nearly 25 years of rule by the AKP and its Islamist predecessors. The result has been subject to numerous partial recounts, which reduced his margin of victory to around 14,000 votes. The judicial probes have been seized …

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When British police first visited 41-year-old Steven Bishop at his home in the ethnically-diverse London suburb of Thornton Heath he told them he was planning a fireworks display. But officers, who had been alerted by one of Bishop’s co-workers who feared his colleague was making a bomb, examined the fireworks and discovered they had been tampered with. Last month, Bishop, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, pleaded guilty to terror charges, including planning an attack on a nearby mosque in revenge — as he saw it — for the 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bombing by a radical Islamist that left …

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VOA’s Nike Ching at the State Department, Carla Babb at the Pentagon, and Patsy Widakuswara at the White House contributed to this report. WHITE HOUSE — U.S. President Donald Trump says he has had a very positive phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Venezuela and other issues that lasted more than one hour.  “He is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela other than he’d like to see something positive happen for Venezuela. I feel the same way,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon. Trump, speaking alongside Slovak Republic Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini, …

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U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin for more than an hour on Friday, discussing the possibility of a new nuclear accord, North Korean denuclearization and the political situation in Venezuela, the White House said. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters Trump and Putin talked about the possibility of a new multilateral nuclear accord between the United States, Russia and China, or an extension of the current U.S.-Russia strategic nuclear treaty. Sanders said the conversation lasted for more than an hour and briefly touched upon Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 …

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A Turkish citizen who was wounded during deadly attacks at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on March 15 has died, Turkey’s foreign minister said Thursday, raising the death toll from the shooting to 51. “We have unfortunately lost our citizen … who was critically wounded in the heinous attack in Christchurch, New Zealand,” Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Twitter. The man’s brother told Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency that the man had been taken to surgery Thursday, but that he could not be saved. “He had surgery today, they couldn’t stop the bleeding so we lost him. …

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